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Ubuntu Finds New Love With Qt

Phoronix: Ubuntu Finds New Love With Qt

Mark Shuttleworth has announced today on his blog that as part of Ubuntu 11.10 they are looking at expanding their support for the Qt tool-kit. They are looking at now including the Qt libraries as part of their default Ubuntu installation and to include worth while Qt applications...

My only comment here is that including the qt-core and qt-gui libs on the Live CD will be difficult to impossible, without culling more built-in applications. They really need to retire the Live CD concept entirely and go with a Live DVD clocking in around 2GB -- large enough to ship Qt, Gtk, OpenOffice, Gimp, and a whole slew of useful software, but without being so painfully bloated as to just barely fit on a DVD. The bandwidth required to push copies of a full 4.7GB DVD is, after all, more than twice that required for a 2GB DVD image. It's a compromise: goodbye CD-R* media, without killing everyone's capped internet connections too badly.

As libraries, the kernel, and the base system continue to get larger and more complex, it's becoming harder and harder to meet that 700 MB target. For people who refuse to buy a $20 DVD-RW drive, I say point them to Lubuntu or Xubuntu, which will continue to ship primarily GTK apps based on their respective slimmed-down desktop environments, so I expect these two distros will be able to ship under 700 MB easily for quite some time.

It's time that the flagship product of "Ubuntu" starts to offer a more robust out of the box install, without sacrificing kernel headers, gcc, or any of the other big bits that people repeatedly want to put on the chopping block. I'm all for Qt by default, but not if it means cutting out more stuff that's been in previous releases. The CD-RW is dead; all hail the DVD-RW!

Glad the taboo (the shipping of qt libraries with the default gnome setup) has been lifted. Common sense finally prevailed. One stubborn (and stupid) policy less in Ubuntu, hopefully more of them are on the way out.